Good Grief has today premiered their new video for the track titled ‘High To Low’, from their upcoming album ‘Shake Your Faith’, releasing on and in various formats on March 18th via Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records.
You know you’re in for some good sh*t when, right off the bat, you smile and feel like you’re watching something big. That’s what I got when I hit play on ‘High To Low’. I get that MTV ‘120 Minutes’ feeling when that show would come on (yes I gave my age a bit here), but it needs to be said that this was the music I always lived for and to see it now, new and fresh, and taken to the next level reminds me why I do this.
At first, when I heard this song, I was reminded of bands like Hüsker Dü, vintage Replacements, pre famous Soul Asylum, and the like. That glorious unsung era of guitar rock where the licks meant more than the looks. With Good Grief, I hear not only a continuation of that, but a branching out. A sheer advancement into the realm of originality. And Good Grief pull that off with no effort. They own this music. This style. That lick. They are the music because that music is them. To add to a genre is hard enough but to do it with a signature sound all your own is almost impossible.
And while the video is a visual track to the sound and the song is a bit of a soundtrack to the video, we get that rough and ready marriage of the senses to create a gateway drug for your next favorite artist.
Good Grief certainly kicks out the jams, after they punch them in the nuts. And they do it with a hook.
In 1963 Akira Kurosawa made a film called High And Low based on a 1959 crime novel – King’s Ransom – by Ed McBain. I wrote this song as a tribute to a stunning piece of cinema and a compelling piece of crime fiction. Carrying on the tradition, this video reinterprets our interpretation of Kurosawa’s interpretation of McBain’s book.
It was an exercise in taking something grand and trying to distill it down into a series of sounds and images to re-tell the story… the striking clock, the train, the good versus the bad, the rich against the poor and so on – the duality that’s somehow always present in the things we do and the decisions we make.
Paul Abbott (bassist)
The video was made by Liam Ashcroft of the bands Crocodile God and Mugsmasher, who put an astonishing amount of work into the animation. We mentioned the ‘pink smoke’ aesthetic as the one idea we wanted to transfer to the visuals, and he totally nailed it.
When Paul brought this song to practice, we knew the album was taking shape.
Will Fitzpatrick (guitarist)
About Good Grief
Good things come to those who wait, and in the case of Liverpool’s Good Grief, the wait was worth it. The band first appeared back in 2013 via a series of split 7″s and an excellent EP on Odd Box Records. HHBTM loved them, excitedly pairing them up for a split single with like-minded band Eureka California, who then brought them over for an American tour. So you can believe us when we say we’re excited about the release of the band’s long-awaited debut album Shake Your Faith, which comes out February 22nd on HHBTM (US) and Everything Sucks Music (UK/Europe).
Formed in 2012 by Liverpudlian guitarist/vocalist Will Fitzpatrick, bassist/vocalist Paul Abbott and drummer Matiss Dale, Good Grief released a handful of singles before real life took precedence and the band took a back seat in 2015. They never officially broke up, though, regrouping to play the occasional date, sometimes with big names like Wussy and Superchunk. Good Grief fully reactivated in 2018, and spent 2019 working on and off on what would become Shake Your Faith. They were all set to finish and release the album in 2020, but then…well, you know what happened.
“It’s strange, recording in start-stop fashion,” Fitzpatrick states. “Your self-belief ebbs and flows at the best of times, and it’s not always easy to ride its waves, especially if you’re not sure when you’ll next be allowed into a confined space. In the end, I think the uncertainty in the air imbued our sessions with a tension that mirrors some of the record’s themes appropriately. The sense of release at being able to return to the studio certainly helped as well; you can hear that especially in the coda to [penultimate track] ‘Hatches’, I think.”
Shake Your Faith blasts the listener with a guitar rock that will sound quite inviting to fans of groups such as Superchunk, Sugar, and Jawbreaker. A little punk rock, a little indie rock, and a whole lot of fun. You’ll rock out to songs influenced by everything from mental health, the New York school of poetry, the films of Akira Kurosawa, Seinfeld, novelist David Grossman, and the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Mostly, though, you’ll hear heartfelt songs that revolve around questioning yourself and a general sense of dislocation. Shake Your Faith will rock your body while making you think about the bigger picture of life and everything in it.
“It’s been a long road for us to get to this album, with real life, health and even a pandemic getting in the way at various points,” Fitzpatrick says. “I’m just psyched people can finally wrap their ears around it.”
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/goodgriefliverpool
https://goodgriefliverpool.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/goodgrieflpool
https://www.instagram.com/goodgrieflpool
